A self-organizing network (SON) is an automation technology designed to make the planning, configuration, management, optimization, and healing of mobile radio access networks simpler and faster. SON functionality and behavior has been defined and specified in generally accepted mobile industry recommendations produced by organizations such as 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN). SON is considered critical to operators' strategy for meeting the exploding demand for data in the coming decade—the era of the Internet of Things. SON is considered necessary to automate operations and optimize performance in a scalable manner for small cell driven heterogeneous networks (HetNets). As SON evolves it will be run on Big Data platforms in the cloud powered by “intelligent” predictive analytics algorithms.
Coverage Capacity Optimization (CCO) is a SON use case that initially configures and adjusts key RF parameters (antenna tilt and azimuth configuration and power) post-deployment to maximize some measure of user quality of experience (QoE) (in particular, coverage, quality and capacity) and adapt to changing traffic patterns and changes in environment. CCO is expected to work on a long time-scale in the order of hours/days to capture and react to long term or seasonal changes in traffic and environment and also allow for sufficient data collection for accurate observation and estimation of CCO performance.
A current CCO solution is known as Automatic Cell Planner (ACP). ACP uses measure report (MR) and drive test (DT) data with user equipment (UE) geo-location data obtained through Assisted Global Positioning System (AGPS) and accurate antenna configuration parameters for accurate propagation modeling. However, ACP being a modeling approach requires costly drive testing and human verification. For ACP, knowledge of UE locations is essential and obtaining accurate antenna configuration parameters is subject to human error. Moreover, ACP is not scalable to small cells and HetNets as too much manual effort is required for setup and verification.